November 2012

11/28/2012

Autodesk is recognizing a group of industrial design students enrolled in the Automotive Design course at Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City for using Autodesk software to develop the award-winning Aurora green concept car as part of their curricula. For their efforts, the students have been named the Autodesk November Inventor of the Month. Autodesk names an Inventor of the Month each month for designers who use Autodesk software in an innovative fashion.

The Aurora project focused on the challenge of designing a car that would be suitable for megacity environments where large, growing populations can quickly contribute to pollution and environmental strain.

Rather than relying on a fuel-hungry central combustion engine, theAurora uses hybrid propellingtechnologies to power the car. Magnetic propulsion provides power for city driving, while the car’s suspension converts the car’s upward and downward motion into energy that can be stored in rechargeable batteries connected to localized motors on the rear wheels.

The concept car also features virtual interactive controllers connected to smart traffic clearinghouses, to automated driving systems, and to the houses and offices of the users — representing an embrace of developing automotive trends such as smart traffic systems and autonomous transport.

Autodesk Software Powers Students’ Innovation

“Having access to Autodesk software gave our students the tools to reimagine what an urban car should look like in the 21st century,” said Juan José Ramos, director of the Mexico-based industrial design firm DX Consulting and instructor in Automotive Design at Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey. “Autodesk software aided their progress at every stage of the design concept.”

The students also used Autodesk Inventor software — part of Autodesk Product Design Suite — to create 3D digital models and motion animations of the mechanical systems and infrastructure of the concept car, as well as to create models of large avenues in Mexico City that represented a typical megacity driving environment.

In July 2012, the Aurora concept car was chosen as the final project toparticipate in the "Innovative Mobility Solutions (IMS)" global contest organized by the General Motors Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE) program in Shanghai, China.

The team from Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey won the important “Best Creative Research” and “Best Concept Development” prizes, reflecting the high design quality and development tool expertise achieved by the students.

by Lynelle Cameron, Senior Director of Sustainability and Philanthropy, Autodesk

This week, our partners, customers and followers in the press have gathered in Las Vegas for Autodesk University. Autodesk is first and foremost a technology company, and attendees will spend their time at AU learning about the technology that is available today.

However, throughout this week, I invite everyone, whether attending in person or online, to stretch your brain; to think about what the technology is enabling real people to do that’s outside of the usual. This week is not just about just technology, or about a single company. It’s about how designers, engineers and creative people everywhere are markedly changing the future of how everything on this planet is made.

Today Autodesk helps more than 10 million professional customers; nearly 100 million users of our personal and consumer tools; and millions of students to create literally anything their imaginations can conjure up. But, beyond this, our business is founded on helping people imagine, design and create a better world. We take these last two words – better world – very seriously.

At Autodesk, our vision of a better world is one in which “9 billion people live well and live within the limits of the planet.” It is the ultimate design challenge of our time. Nine billion is a conservative estimate of what the earth’s population will reach by 2050. All 9 billion will want to enjoy a certain quality oflife, yet must do so within the design constraints of a finite planet.

It is a big bold vision for what a better world could look like. In fact, it is the ultimate design challenge of our time. Is it a wildly crazy idea? Maybe. But wild and crazy is where today’s most innovative designs started. And actually, not doing this could in fact be a far crazier idea. So that’s where we’ll start too.

This week, we’ll take you on a journey where you’ll see some fascinating examples of what people can do with Autodesk technologies – everything from a small architecture firm in Sao Paulo designing Brasilia National Stadium, the world’s first “net zero energy” major sports stadium; to our nonprofit partner Architecture for Humanity using our software to help communities and businesses recover from natural disasters, as with the most recent Superstorm Sandy.

With modeling technology today, we can begin to model what would happen in different scenarios before a storm hits. For events like Sandy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration can predict the geography and size of the tidal surge based on weather modeling. With our infrastructure modeling tools, we can then estimate which pieces of infrastructure and buildings will be hit, and by how much water. We can then test the affected storm runoff infrastructure to see if it can handle that volume of water over that much time. And of course after disaster strikes, we can also rely on technology to help reconstruct and redesign differently

Autodesk is also talking a lot this week about the new technologies that we’re unveiling to enable people to create a better tomorrow – exploring the boundless things that can be done with cloud-based tools and collaboration capabilities, 3D modeling and simulation, just to name a few.

We now have ridiculously powerful technology at our fingertips – and I don’t mean in the hands of just professional designers sitting in offices. These technologies are accessible on handheld devices, in remote mountain villages, deep underwater or far in space. And all these people, regardless of their location, can connect to each other and share their bold ideas and real world designs.

My ultimate hope is that the customers with us this week, or participating virtually, will be inspired by eachother’s stories - and will start to collaborate, brainstorm and solve problems in entirely new ways. A better world needs more creative people - exactly the kind of people wandering the halls at AU this week.

11/27/2012

It’s an exciting time at Autodesk: design is playing an increasingly important role in business and the world; our consumer business is growing rapidly; and we are leading the transition to the cloud. This blog is a home for Autodesk news and a regularly-updated resource for everybody who follows Autodesk including media, bloggers, customers and partners. We plan to publish everything from traditional news announcements to opinion pieces written by Autodesk executives, employees and friends.

Autodesk is a leader in both professional and personal design, engineering and entertainment software and has tens of millions of customers in more than 180 countries around the world. For more than 30 years, Autodesk tools have been helping to drive the design of nearly everything around us –roads and bridges, modern skyscrapers, cars (and most of the components inside of those cars), and each one of the last 17 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects. Everyone from engineers, architects, design professionals and creative artists to students and hobbyists use our software, cloud services and mobile apps. All of them have interesting stories to tell, and where better to find those unique perspectives than here on our blog?

Please feel free to reach out to us to discuss any of these stories in greater depth, to let us know what you’d like to see, or just to say hi.